


The Redacted Report of the Long Lunch

by fresne



Series: The Long road [2]
Category: Jeeves - P. G. Wodehouse, Pushing Daisies, Sherlock Holmes - Arthur Conan Doyle
Genre: AU, Crack, Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2012-01-16
Updated: 2012-01-16
Packaged: 2017-10-29 16:35:55
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 2
Words: 1,871
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/321910
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/fresne/pseuds/fresne
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>The circumstances under which Mycroft Holmes came to take an extremely long lunch break were either very simple or very complex.</p><p>That lunch lasted twenty years, two months, three days, one hour and one minute. This came to be known in some circles as the Long Lunch.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. The Facts were These

**Author's Note:**

> This story will likely make the most sense if you've already read [The Case of the Rolling Wheel and the Long Road](http://archiveofourown.org/works/174237). In fact, the narrator is certain of it.
> 
> Ah, but you're a busy sort of chappie or dashing sort of lady. This does make it dashed awkward for the narrator. Ah, it's like this, sometimes death has a gracey sort of period, which may be strange to hear, but there it is. Now Mycroft Holmes, on account of being a pure brain, had found a way to stick his oar in that grace period and keep on swimming on upstream when he was still young enough to enjoy a bit of a punt. So to speak. There now, that should put you in the right frame to jump on the wall.
> 
> The following inspiration for this work and inspiration for my dialogue, where I am not directly quoting, because apt quotes are cool:  
> Works of PG Wodehouse

The circumstances under which Mycroft Holmes came to take an extremely long lunch break were either very simple or very complex.

In either case, the facts were these. When Mycroft Holmes was sixty-five years, two months, eight days, three hours and two minutes old, he went to his small windowless office in Whitehall and sat at his wide wooden desk with its stack of manila folders. He opened the first folder and read the final details of the various other agreements to end the War to End All Wars. It took him thirty-two minutes to read each detail. When he was done, he looked at the blank white washed wall across from his desk. He spent forty-seven minutes staring at the spackled crack in that wall. This was not because it was an interesting crack.

For you see, when Mycroft Holmes had been forty years, six months, nine days, ten hours and nine minutes old, he had told his younger brother, Sherlock, that "Someone has to watch matters." That had been his explanation for a certain decision that he had made to stop his clock so to speak three years, one month, three days, one hour and five minutes previously. His memory efficiently returned the taste of the whiskey that they had consumed in the Diogenes Club visitors room while they discussed this decision.

He called up the details of that decision itself. The actions that he had caused to be taken. Each had been rational in the extreme. The smokey taste of diced Mandragora Officinarum over a medium rare porter house steak with asparagus and bearnaise sauce. It had been an excellent last meal. The Maison du Perigord vintage 1885 had been an excellent pairing with hints of tobacco, tar, leather and bramble fruit. Given the extent of the man’s illness, his dinner companion hadn't been able to enjoy more than a few sips and of necessity, none of the meal. But still, he had been enough of a gentlemen to thank Mycroft for the opportunity to provide for his family with the gift of his grace period. Young Heidi had been too young to enjoy the wine, as Mycroft had never held with watering wine for children, but she had enjoyed her rather simpler meal.

As he thought about that meal and stared at the spackled crack in the wall, Mycroft's mind simultaneously analyzed the report that he had just read along five additional tracks, but each returned the same conclusion. He made himself put aside that report. He wrote up his analysis in twenty-two minutes, but the decisions were already done. It would not be read. He said to the room, "Someone has to watch matters." The room, in that he was the only one there, did not answer. He did not expect it to. He was not Lady Macbeth. There were labs full of clever fellows at work at all manner of chemicals to get out any stain.

It was time to read the next report. He was one hour and forty-one minutes older than he had been before he read the first report. He did not not open the next folder. Instead, without his asking for it, fragments of reports of the last five years returned unbidden. Details and numbers and photos. Hundreds of photos, because he spared himself nothing in his review. As if that were not enough, reports from the last twenty years. Reports from the last forty-one years, one month, three days, one hour, and thirty minutes.

At that precise moment in time, the term bandwidth referred to a range of frequencies measured in hertz. Had the word bandwidth referred to a rate of data transfer measured in bits per second, Mycroft Holmes could have reported that his bandwidth had been exceeded. However, the word bandwidth did not have that definition yet. Instead, Mycroft Holmes sat at his wide desk and did not read his reports.

Instead he thought of a cricket match that he had attended in 1909 in Hawes. Not because Mycroft had at any point in his life any interest in cricket, but in the way of personally following up on the progeny of his grace period. His brother’s fancies not withstanding, he did sometimes leave his orbit. On that day, young Percy took sixty-five wickets at seven and half runs a piece. Mycroft recalled the sound of the cockerel crows as they perched on grey walls of the Stone House to watch the game. He recalled the progress of his grace period's progeny in game and wicket and match. He perfectly recalled, as he did all things, a report of the High Wood offensive during the Battle of the Somme, which brought all that progress to a full stop. So much progress. On the wall behind his desk perched a fan of white dove feathers. It had been a gift from his brother. Mycroft was not actually the entire government. He was not Richard III and this was not the winter of his discontent.

Any minute he was going to read the next report. The clock on the wall ticked. The desk calendar marked the day.

He did not read the next report. Instead for two hours and twenty-eight minutes, he sat at his wide desk in his small windowless office and stared at a spackled crack in the wall while his mind processed at the limits of a definition of a word that did not yet have that meaning.

At the end of that time, he did not say, “I need a vacation.” He opened his pocket watch, despite the clock on the wall, and consulted the time. He said, “It is time for lunch.”

That lunch lasted twenty years, two months, three days, one hour and one minute. This came to be known in some circles as the Long Lunch.


	2. The Amuse Bouche

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> In which Mycroft Holmes begins his lunch.

Mycroft’s lunch began in the usual manner. He went to his regular table at Mancini’s, which had not gone by that name in twenty years, but Mycroft could not be bothered with that sort of trifle. He made the same Wednesday order that he had made for the last forty years, three months, and seven days. Admittedly during the Great War, his side of beef had come back as beef broth with a touch of wallpaper paste, but he always made the same order. If beef broth with wallpaper paste instead of side of beef resulted in the loss of some six stone from his frame, he had had it to lose.

As he sat, he followed his usual course of watching the other patrons. By the window there was an obvious French spy by his trouser cuffs and hat at a meeting with a less obvious Swedish spy by his tie pin and belt. By the kitchen door, a Times reporter by the color of the ink on his shirt sleeves worked a crossword. He wouldn’t solve it. Three across was not what he thought it was. In the dark booth, a secretary by her finger calluses continued her an unfortunate affair with her employer, which was sordid and tiresome for both of them. At the next table, an enigma spoke in a vehement manner with some Drones, which is to say members of the Drones club.

Mycroft blinked. But the enigma was still enigmatic when his grey eyes opened. He narrowed his eyes. By the man’s grey pallor, age, and posture, the enigma was an ex-officer and a graduate of Magdalene besides. None of this was particularly enigmatic. The man’s speech with his fellow Drone club members was not particularly enigmatic. Mentally negligible. With many hand gestures. The enigma said, “I'm not absolutely certain of the facts, but I rather fancy it's Shakespeare who says that it's always just when a fellow is feeling particularly braced with things in general that Fate sneaks up behind him with the bit of lead piping.” He waved a copy of “Types of Ethical Theory” in the air. A gift it seemed from his fiance Lady Florence Craye. That he almost brained his friends with his flailing of the book was not enigmatic, but simple physics.

What was enigmatic was that the fellow’s every word, gesture and deed indicated that he clearly did not remember that there had been a war of any sort. The more he opined on uncles and fiancees and rescuing young women from assassins because it was a lovely spring day, the more certain Mycroft was of that fact.

He was plotting. He plotted. It was the most unfortunately prone to disaster plan that Mycroft had been privilege to hear since he’d gone to lunch. By Mycroft’s calculations, the after affects would be a broken vase, a perturbed uncle, a disengagement and a lost shoe.

All the more unfortunate as Mycroft could also see that the man’s gentleman’s gentleman had been stealing his socks, although sadly not the checkered suit with which he as currently visually assaulting the restaurant. He would also need a sound hangover remedy if the ghastly array of mixed drinks that accompanied his luncheon were any indication. But the primary fact was that even sitting three tables from a former Major of the Royal Scott Fusiliers, less his left arm, the enigma droned and piffled with no memory of anything less pleasant than an Aunt, whose luncheons were like evisceration.

In that moment, Mycroft Holmes wanted very much to know the trick to forgetting. He very much wanted the reorganization of disastrous plots that would save the loss of a shoe. Although, perhaps not the shoes that the enigma was currently wearing.

He still wanted these things after the luncheon hour was over. Therefore, he decided that lunch would not be over any time soon.

It is for this simple reason that he did not go back to his small windowless office with its wide desk and stack of reports.

It is for this complex reason that he went to a very different office and arranged for some papers and references in the name of his grace period, Reginald Jeeves. It was in this way that he left his orbit entirely.

In the morning, his universe changed his axis and Mycroft Holmes did not go to his office. Instead R. Jeeves mixed for Bertram Wilberforce Wooster a hangover remedy of egg yolk, Worcestershire sauce, red pepper, and an anti reagent from one of the labs that did not exist.

It was on that day that a twenty-four year old transparent enigma with the gift of forgetfulness put his soul into the clutches of a gentleman’s gentleman who never did learn to forget, but who found it all a useful exercise in organizing from plain sight.

Admittedly, in the first year, Bertram Wilberforce Wooster, aka Bertie, became engaged to no fewer than twenty-eight spies and provocateurs, the first of which was Lady Florence herself, but it could not be helped. Lady Florence had had plans rather worse than a love of Nietzsche. As Spinoza might have remarked this circumstance was attributable to Wooster substance, Bertram attributes, and Mycroft’s own modes of action.

Really, the main thing to understand is that it was, by all accounts, a very long, but very relaxing lunch.

**Author's Note:**

> For capricious, who is reading Wodehouse and bugged in my bonnet this idea.
> 
> If after reading my fiction here, you would like to read more about me and my writing check out my profile.


End file.
